PoPCast Ep 17 Transcript

Travis: Welcome back to Podcast Reboot listeners. 

Whitney: Woohoo. Yes. I'm so excited about these upcoming episodes. Travis, 

Travis: I am as well, and we are going to take this episode to talk through what is coming up in the next group of episodes in this podcast. 

Whitney: Just think free PD for you where you can be responsive to your students, where you're going to be walking you through.

Can I say it, Travis? What we're gonna be doing? 

Travis: Yeah. You better. Set it up. 

Whitney: We're walking you through how to plan for the parents of power process, meaning how to pull from your own text, maybe texts that are mandated that you have to use, or you just want to use some newer text or texts that your students already know and love.

So we're going to really walk you through what it takes to plan for that. And then in the end. We're actually gonna give you a free lesson, the ones that we did for each of those. 

Travis: We are going to walk you through each of the grade bands of Patterns of Power resources in the upcoming episodes. So if you are an elementary user working in grades two through five, you have the orange book. We're gonna dig into building a lesson together with that. We'll go into the middle school resource, the green book for grades six through eight. We'll even go into the beautiful sky blue Patterns of Wonder Resource for pre-K through grade one, and then we will dig into the purple resource to the high school for grades nine through 12.

Whitney: And with that, so this one is just us telling you how we're going to walk you through each of these series or each of these episodes. But the actual [00:02:00] episodes where we're planning and walking you through the planning, we're also going to have video attached to that. So it will be like a free webinar for you as well, right?

You can listen to it but you can also watch us work through that too. 

Travis: All right, so what are we gonna include here? Yes. I know. This is exciting. We're 

Whitney: playing. This is, we love to play and try things out and see how it goes. 

Travis: And also our hope is that this is gonna be highly supportive to you for sure.

As a listener. If you've stuck with us through all of these great episodes, we're gonna give you some free PD and some new learning or some strengthening of your learning around the Patterns of Power process. 

Whitney: Yeah, we've been on Patterns of Revision for a while, so we're gonna turn back over to some grammar focus work with Patterns of Power.

Travis: Alright, so what does this look like? Let's talk you through what to expect in these upcoming episodes. So we are going to start by deciding on a text that we are going to use as the focal point for that specific lesson. We'll give you some grounding in the context where we might envision this text working within our classroom.

So whether it's a, Hey, this is a new book that we think would be great as a read aloud that would then lead into a lesson or, Hey, we are in this specific unit. We are using this specific text as a mentor for this specific mode of writing or this genre. Then using that as an entry point into the lesson.

We'll give you some context. We will also share with you the specific text that we're using and give you some sort of within the show notes connection point to be able to access that piece of, or an excerpt of that text to be able to follow along with us. 

Whitney: The other thing that we're going to be giving you is a [00:04:00] planning template. One side is annotated where it walks you through things to consider, and that's what we're gonna talk about in this episode. And the other side is a blank template for you to use as well as you are planning for your own lessons too. 

Our ultimate goal with Patterns of Power is for you to turn around and plan for the students in front of you. We like the lessons and Patterns of Power as a place for you to get started. Something for you to see how the process works. And we all love ready to go, ready to use lessons. But then we get to a point in our teaching when we understand the process well enough and our students understand it well enough that we start to think, “Oh, you know, I could really use a sentence from the text that I'm using,” or, ”We're really thinking about ways to maximize the time that we have with our students and how can we differentiate from what's in the Patterns of Power book to what I can do in my classroom?” 

And that's what we want to take you through, is how to now transfer this to your own planning process and thinking about the students in front of you, the text that you maybe have to read and of course those standards that you have to teach. 

Travis: Great. Whitney, let's go into the planning process and let's just briefly talk about and highlight the process that we are going to go through as our own virtual professional learning community as we plan this out each lesson.

Whitney: Okay, perfect. So one of the things that we have to think about is what do we wanna teach our students? We have to start there. Important. Important, yeah. The standard, the skill. It may be a state standard that we're looking at that we need to make sure that we cover. Or we might be looking at the writing where students realize they have maybe a gap or something they're doing consistently that we want to address.

And so we can use that skill or or the craft move, around grammar that we really want to hone in on with our students. So that's the very first thing, is figuring out what it is that we want to teach. 

And what Travis and I are gonna [00:06:00] do in this series of episodes is we're really gonna follow one thread. So we're going to take one skill that's a grammar move that's used, in writing all the way from when we're doing just oral language rehearsal in pre-K in kinder, all the way up through high school. This one thread and how it becomes more complex as students become more sophisticated writers.

So just keep in mind we're going to be choosing that, that one skill to carry through. But that's something you'll want to do first. 

Travis: Yeah, and then we will have a brief discussion based on kinda where our students, where we envision our students are at that level, have a conversation as we suggest that each grade level group, a team, as they're coming together to plan a lesson out, has the same conversation around purpose and craft.

So as we are really keying in on a specific pattern that we want to study, it's always great to have the same foundational understanding around WHY might a writer choose to use this? What purpose does this specific craft move serve, or this specific. Grammatical patterns serve as well as the craft of it, HOW, what options do we have? How do we do it so that we can better inform students and be better facilitators of this learning as they are exploring this craft move as they interact with it in the text that we're going to highlight. 

Whitney: So one of the discussions Travis and I had during this process of planning for this series is what is a thread that we could really follow all the way through?

And we got to talking, it came from our patterns of revision work, of getting students to add more and to make connections with their ideas in their texts. So just know that this, the pattern that we're really going to be focusing on is adding more and making those connections. So how can we connect to our ideas in a way for our reader [00:08:00] to make sense of our ideas. 

Travis: Yeah. And we know that connecting ideas together is a great way to build  more complex, sophisticated language. So that is always something that we're striving for as teachers of writers, helping students to see very overt ways that we can connect our ideas to make them more sophisticated in our writing.

So we feel like if you are a kindergartner, if you are a ninth grader, connecting ideas together as a thinker and writer is really important. So we're gonna follow that thread across the board. Within all of these lessons, you'll see that come up over and over again, and we want you to see the increased complexity that we give this specific pattern as we circle back to it within each grade band.

Whitney: Really a vertical alignment of this specific pattern. And so through those discussions we were thinking about the author's purpose and craft. You know, why do writers add details or connect their ideas? And then how do they do that? And that really helped us when looking at mentor texts and texts that we were going to start looking into thinking about that pattern and the purpose and craft behind that.

So that is going to continue to come up in our conversations as well, is this thoughtful and intentional work around purpose and craft. Why writers do what they do and how they do it. And when we look at the craft of the sentence, we really wanna think about our own students in our classroom because sometimes we find a sentence that's beautifully crafted, but maybe in elementary that is a beautifully crafted sentence, but that's not quite where we are. As writers say in third grade, right? 

Or in the upper grades, maybe we have a very simply crafted sentence where we want to find something that maybe will give the students a little bit more challenge to [00:10:00] use more sophisticated structures to make meaning from their text.

Travis: Absolutely. And, and on the flip side too, sometimes we run into sentences that really require a lot of context from before and after to really make sense of that as a standalone. So while we might have an idea that connects ideas together brilliantly, without that context of the paragraph before and after, it doesn't hit as strongly as we have, as we talk about, or as one of our beliefs, is that we want to simplify this, so that students can better understand and grapple with this pattern to then be able to do some of that deep thinking and challenging themselves as thinkers to be able to incorporate it into their work as writers.

Whitney: That's a great point. The other thing that we want to make sure you have an understanding of is that we're not just going to pull this lesson out of our head. We actually prefer to go back to Patterns of Power and find a lesson that if it's a skill that is, or a pattern that is used in Patterns of Power, we can use that lesson.

As a template for us, we can actually borrow things from that lesson. For instance, I may choose to use the focus phrase from that lesson instead of creating my own focus phrase. Maybe I take a look at what the focus phrase is in a Patterns of Power lesson and choose to use that same one. Or I can use that focus phrase and modify it a little bit to help it be more intentional for my students; ones that they can really remember and use in their own writing. 

Travis: Yeah, so we're gonna highlight all the efficiency hacks that we know and that we use. To be able to help you support efficient planning. We know that you don't have a lot of time to plan. Oftentimes, maybe you have a 45 minute planning period and maybe 20 of those 45 minutes are already [00:12:00] spoken for, so we are going to try to give you as many efficiency hacks as possible.

Whitney really highlighted one of the best ones: crossing over into the Patterns of Power book and looking for opportunities to be able to grab and go. So if you like the model sentence from that Patterns of Power lesson that already exists, you can pull that and use that as a compare and contrast to go with the model that you already have.

You like the imitation prompts that we are giving you? Take 'em, put 'em into practice. 

Whitney: Absolutely. 

Travis: We're really gonna highlight that as well within each of these planning episodes where we would go in the book. If you have a book with you, you are welcome to open to that page and follow along with us as we talk through how we might break that lesson down and use those elements to best serve us as we are building this brand new lesson.

Whitney: So one of the things we want to do is choose the sentence that we want to use in the invitation to notice. We may choose a text where we may start with our standard. For instance, we have a standard we have to teach. And now I'm gonna go into some text that maybe I've used during read-aloud, or that my students, I find a lot of my students are reading during independent reading time. I sometimes like to go to the library and ask the librarian, Hey, what are some really high interest texts right now that students are checking out a lot?

And I can search through several of those texts, try to find an example of that standard. Or if I know the skill that I want to teach or the craft move based on the writing that they're doing, I can go into the text and look for that specific skill. 

But there's also a lot of us that have mandated texts that we have to use. Maybe we're in a program and we have a text per week that we have to use. So we could even go into that text and instead of looking for something specific, look for a sentence [00:14:00] that highlights something valuable that we could turn around and teach our students. 

Travis: We will highlight for you what it looks like to use a model from a text that we are going to simply read aloud in class and use that as a way to elevate choice reading.

We will also take a look at when we have mandated curriculum. We have this model that we have to use. How can we go in and extract more if we already know we're going to use this with a reading focus, possibly with a constructed response focus? How can we add another layer and use our work with Patterns of Power to run parallel to the work that we are already doing?

Whitney: And it is important to think about when we write, what are we writing for, right? What are our writing units coming up?

Or what is the writing that we're doing right now? What patterns would flow really nicely into that work? And that's another reason why we chose the pattern that we did, is because it flows nicely into everything. But especially with so many of us at this time of year doing a lot of writing about reading, responding to texts, sharing our opinions or arguments or explaining what's happening in text or making connections as prompts give us what we have to write about. 

And so this is a nice piece to think about. This is how an author does it in a piece of text. How can we do it and when we write about that reading as well. We have that transfer piece too. 

Travis: So this is what is coming up in PoPCast Reboot. We are so excited about it.

We're excited to share these lessons with you and take you on our journey with you hanging out with us as we plan through some Patterns of Power lessons. 

Whitney: Yeah. We'll be going through the whole process , and it will be quick 'cause we don't want to spend a lot of time on these. We don't want you to be listening for [00:16:00] hours. But we do plan to talk about the invitation to notice, planning for that, planning for the compare contrast, and then planning for the imitation. What, what could that look like? Then how might we celebrate and come back to that planning for the celebration. It doesn't have to be big, but we do wanna make a plan for that.

And then really talk a little bit more about applying and what that could look like in writing, the writing that we're doing. And then we are going to have conversations about that in editing conversation because there is a lot that can go into the planning on that piece that can be extremely powerful, for maximizing your time in the classroom. 

Travis: So we wanna shrink your anxiety. We want to grow your confidence. We want to ensure that you walk away from each of these upcoming episodes, feeling empowered to go back into texts and the work that you're doing in your classroom to find some more success with this process.

Whitney: Love that. 

Travis: Can't wait 

Whitney: work. Travis? 

Travis: Yeah. All right. So we'll be hanging out with you soon. Be on the lookout for the next episode. 

Whitney: Can't wait.